We recently asked an expert within our organisation to review a proposal.

I won’t name the field. What matters is that this person had years of experience that we needed to refine the work before it was actioned by the team.

We needed their personal input.

What had we missed? Were we asking the right questions? Was there anything in the approach that their experience told them would cause problems?

About a week passed. We followed up, explaining that we really needed their input and valued their expertise.

An hour later a three page Word document arrived.

It had all the hallmarks of an AI-generated response. Jargon is rife in our line of work but this response used jargon from a completely different industry. It used terms we would never use, and that we had never heard this person use either!

We suspected the proposal had been put through Copilot. We didn’t ask, so I can’t tell you exactly how it was produced or how carefully it was reviewed but it was pretty obvious.

What was most frustrating was that we could have put the brief through Copilot ourselves a week earlier - and probably had the project well under way already.

Whose time did that save?

This is the question I keep coming back to.

We had waited for a review. Now we had three pages to wade through, with unfamiliar terminology to untangle, and still lacked confidence in the proposed approach.

As AI becomes available inside the tools people already use at work, this is becoming an urgent management issue.

Quite often training covers the basics of using AI and what information employees are allowed to put into the system from a policy point of view.

But we need to spend more time on what sits in the grey zone - what is acceptable use and what needs to happen to ensure AI and humans work together create real value for your organisation.

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This week’s thoughts come from the woods behind my house.

Why the woods? It’s all to do with AI, to be honest.

I’ve been reading through Substack posts in the app, gliding through the comments, and you keep seeing people accusing the author of using AI to write it. Sometimes that’s probably true. Sometimes it isn’t. But the accusation isn’t really the point. The doubt is. And it’s not just doubt about who wrote the post, it’s doubt about whether the author is a real person at all. You start doubting everything you see online.

I hear it from my children too. We were watching Titanic last weekend and I got a “that’s AI, Daddy”. Well, no. It’s CGI, maybe. And the techniques used to make Titanic are genuinely impressive when you remember the film is nearly 30 years old.

So, the video in the woods. One small step in showing that I’m human. This is me. Filmed in one take, birdsong and all.

It’s something I’ve wanted to have a go at for a while, and I enjoyed it more than I expected. Getting my ideas down while getting out of the house after work is no bad thing.

Beyond proving I’m made of flesh and blood, this week I’m talking about AI in the workplace, and there’s a real paradox going on. We’ve got headlines about AI wiping out humanity, while day to day most people at work aren’t even opening the tools already sitting on their desktop. Maybe we’re at the Goldilocks point: useful enough to sort out that spreadsheet, not yet powerful enough to kill us all.

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Is AI actually making us more productive?

After years of playing with ChatGPT, creating silly pictures and asking it to rewrite things in the voice of William Shakespeare, are we finally on the cusp of AI helping us do our jobs?

Maybe.

But my own experience tells me there are some big hurdles to navigate first. In the last month or so I’ve see MS Copilot t…

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An experiment in working with more rhythm.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been trying something called pulsing. It involves spending a period of time concentrating, then deliberately doing something different. It sounds so simple but so many of us just sit for hours doing the same thing!

Time to stop that - ok!

I know how easily I can spend a whole day…

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This was probably the week that AI really landed for me in the workplace. It’s been a few years now since ChatGPT burst onto the scene and wowed us with random poems about even more random topics.

Then of course, it started to get rather good at coding, organising your shopping list, choosing the best trainers for your 13 year old daughter and making sen…

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Ever heard of the term T Shaped?

My boss used to tell us we needed to be more T shaped in our careers. But what did he mean by this and why is that now a very dangerous way to approach your life?

Ok, so a quick explainer of the T Shaped approach. Think of the downward part of the T as you going deep on a subject. It really could be anything - medicine, spreadsheets or gardening - this is your deep knowledge built up through education, reading and taking part in the real world.

The top horizontal bar is your breadth of knowledge. These are the things you can talk about at a dinner party but very quickly run into trouble when there’s an actual expert in the room! Ouch. But it is very valuable none the less. The breadth allows you to join dots from your central discipline into other areas - these people are really valuable to an organisation. Ten years ago I would say do that. Definitely try and get into that position.

But why is this model dangerous?

Well, I don’t need to tell you the world is changing very fast. Your central pillar of your T might be relevant today but it is very possible that tomorrow it will be useless. Think about having serious domain knowledge of being a blacksmith - great until the car came along.

The difference with those poor blacksmiths was they had 20-30 years to retrain before cars properly took over and the horses just became a rich person’s accessory. These days? Well, you might have a week!

But even retraining isn’t good enough. Let’s assume you’ve learned how to mend car engines - OVERNIGHT - well done you! I’m genuinely impressed. The only thing is that a week later, electric cars have made the petrol engine redundant. And off you go again - a new skill to learn.

By this time you aren’t getting much sleep. That learning is relentless. So what can we do?

We need to rethink how we see the world and adopt the M shape.

The M immediately feels more secure. Three downward pillars of solid domain knowledge feels much more stable. If one gets knocked out, you still have two pillars to fall back on.

But hang on one minute. If you could actually gain three pillars of domain knowledge you are probably some kind of genius or someone with endless time to learn this stuff or both. And the thing is, AI is probably coming for your other two pillars while we speak.

And of course, with the touch of a button you can now access the whole breadth of human knowledge and AI will package it up for you instantly, at any level you need.

So that’s not going to work either.

So what should the legs of your M actually be?

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For many people, the hardest part of the day isn’t the day at all.

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Half an hour to reset your team….

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There’s a moment in every team’s year where things start to drift. The energy dips, a change is coming, or you’ve just lost the thread a little. You know the feeling. And as the person leading the team, you’re trying to work out how to get things back on track without it feeling forced.

Here’s somethin…

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A Morning Check-In That Actually Works When Life Speeds Up

There is a strange tension in the weeks before Christmas.

On the surface, it is meant to be a golden stretch of the year. Lights in windows, end of year drinks, school concerts, Christmas markets, all of that. Yet underneath, for a lot of people, this is the time when work builds to a crescendo, diaries fill up, and life feels like it is moving a little too fast.

I feel it most in the mornings.

The alarm goes, it is still dark, and that quiet window between waking up and starting work feels like it shrinks a little more every day. I want to get outside, to run or walk or at least see some daylight, but sunrise is late, the garden is muddy, and the pressure of the day is already at my shoulder telling me to get to my desk.

For years, this period between late November and Christmas has been the hardest part of the year for my mind.

When the mornings started to run me

I used to imagine some mythical version of myself who would glide through this season.

He would get up early, have a reflective coffee, move his body, write a few wise words in a journal, then step calmly into the day, unflustered and perfectly prepared. That person stayed mythical.

What actually happened was more familiar. The alarm would go off, I would check my phone, see a work email, think about everything that needed doing, and the day would be underway before I had really arrived in it.

I knew journaling could help. I had read the articles, listened to the podcasts, heard all the talk about reflection, gratitude and intention. I even bought the fancy notebook that was supposed to unlock everything. You know the one. Thick paper, satisfying cover, the sort of notebook that whispers “you are going to do deep work in me”.

Then I would open it, stare at the blank page and feel nothing but resistance.

It felt like I had to conjure something profound out of thin air. I did not know where to start. On the days when I did write, I would keep it up for a few days, then miss one, then another. The notebook would quietly migrate to a shelf. By the time January arrived, the habit was gone and the guilt had arrived in its place.

So I assumed I was simply one of those people who journaling did not work for.

The winter problem

Over time I realised there were two separate things going on.

The first was the season itself. I like being outside. I like light. I find it easier to think clearly when I have stood in the garden for five minutes or gone for a quick walk before work. In this time of year, that becomes harder. It is dark, cold and very often wet. The garden feels like a mud bath. By the time the sun is reasonably up, the laptop is on and the day has started.

The second was the mental noise.

In my job, we are on the cusp of quite a big change for the rail industry. There are many moving parts. I do not think there is a single person who can see the whole thing end to end. Everyone has a slice of the picture. That sort of environment easily creates a sense of background unease. You know something significant is coming, you know it will touch every part of the system, but you do not have a neat story for how it all lands.

That combination, short dark days and long complex problems, is a fertile ground for rumination.

Looking back, I can see that my mornings were not just busy on the outside. They were busy inside my head as well. I was starting each day with other people’s requests, shifting priorities, unanswered questions and a growing sense that life was speeding up while I was still tying my shoes.

What I did not have was a simple way to check in with my own mind before the day got hold of me.

Why the blank page was never going to work

The breakthrough, when it finally came, was embarrassingly simple.

I realised that my problem was not journaling itself. It was the format.

A blank page feels like freedom to some people. To me, at that time of day, it felt like pressure. I was asking my half awake brain to create a coherent essay on my inner life before I had even had breakfast.

No wonder I avoided it.

What I actually needed was constraints. Fewer choices, fewer decisions, less pressure to perform. A small set of questions that would do the heavy lifting for me and give my mind something solid to lean on.

That is when I came across the idea of using the same three prompts every morning.

Three questions. No more. Always the same. Answered in a couple of lines each.

It sounded almost too basic. Surely that could not make a real difference. Then I tried it properly, not as a one off experiment, but as something I committed to for a few weeks.

That is when things started to shift.

The three questions that changed my winter

Here are the three questions I use each morning.

What is the most important thing I need to do today?
What am I grateful for in my life?
What quality do I want to show the world today?

On the surface these look straightforward. You can probably predict the sort of answers you might write.

The power is not in writing a perfect answer. The power is in the act of answering, consistently, before the world gets hold of you.

The first question cuts through the noise. Work and life both produce long lists. Messages, tasks, requests, worries, half finished thoughts, all swirling together. When you sit down and calmly write the one thing that really matters today, you reclaim some control. You are choosing the lens you will look through, rather than letting the day choose it for you.

The second question shifts the emotional tone. The person you talk to most in your life is yourself. That inner voice can be quietly corrosive if you leave it unchecked. When you ask “What am I grateful for in my life?” you are deliberately nudging that voice to notice what is still good, solid, present. It does not need to be big. Some mornings my answer is genuinely as small as “I am grateful that there is coffee in the cupboard” or “I am grateful that I get to walk my daughter to school.” The smallness does not matter. The direction does.

The third question is about how you want to show up. I like it because it reminds me that I have agency. Even on days when I have very little control over the events, I still have some control over the quality I bring. Some mornings I write “calm”. Some mornings it is “kind”. Some mornings it is “decisive”. There was a recent morning where I wrote, honestly, “I want to show that I am a positive person, but I am struggling today.” That honesty mattered too.

Over time, patterns emerge. You notice that you often choose the same quality. You see that what you are grateful for changes with the season. You start to recognise the difference between days when you picked a clear most important thing, and days when you tried to squeeze three things into that space and ended up moving none of them.

Most of all, you start the day feeling like you have arrived in it on purpose.

You have taken three or four minutes to ask yourself what matters, what is already good, and who you want to be today. That may not change everything that happens, but it changes your footing. You are stepping into the day with your eyes open, not tumbling into it by accident.

So far, this could be enough. You could stop here and still get a lot of value. If you want to keep this as a private pen and paper routine, it will still serve you.

What I have found, though, is that there is a way to take this further, especially in a season where life is accelerating and the stakes feel high.

That is where the paid section of this post comes in.

What you will unlock in the paid section

If you decide to read on as a paid subscriber, here is what you will get.

You will see why these three questions work so well from the point of view of your brain and your habits, and why they are particularly well suited to winter and to busy minds.

You will get a clear way to turn this into a routine that actually sticks, without relying on January motivation or unrealistic new year promises.

You will see how I combine journaling with AI as a sort of reflective partner on difficult days, so that I can process the complexity of work, get perspective on tricky situations, and stop problems from expanding in my head.

Most importantly, you will get a premium Morning Check-In Prompt you can copy and paste into your AI tool of choice each day. It will guide you through the three questions, help you dig a little deeper into what you write, and then summarise your reflections into a short, motivational note you can carry into the day.

If you want to feel more grounded, more focused and more in charge of your mornings, particularly in these short, busy weeks, the next part of this piece will give you a practical system you can start tomorrow.

Why these three questions work so well

Let us look under the surface for a moment.

When you answer “What is the most important thing I need to do today?”, you are doing something your brain finds surprisingly hard when you are stressed. You are prioritising. Under pressure, the mind tends to flatten everything. Every email feels urgent, every request feels equally important, and the result is a vague sense of being chased by your own to do list.

By forcing yourself to pick one thing, you are quietly training the part of your brain that separates signal from noise. You are reminding yourself that not all tasks are equal and that your time and energy should not be spread as if they are.

The gratitude question works on a different level.

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Why Your Weekends Feel Heavy, and the 30 Minute Reset That Fixes It

Most people think they switch off when they close their laptop on a Friday. They don’t.

It took me a long time to realise that the reason my weekends felt heavy had nothing to do with how busy my week had been. It was because I never actually ended the week. I carried it with me.

For a few years, my Saturdays became a bit of a write off.
Friday night was relief.
Saturday morning was fog.

I would wake up and my mind would still be inside my Outlook inbox. Still in meetings. Still holding mental Post-it notes about tasks I needed to pick up on Monday. I would be physically sat at the breakfast table with my family, but mentally I was still at work.

And because of that, Saturdays stopped feeling like Saturdays.
They became recovery days.
Not real recovery.
Just mental decompression.

Then Sunday would finally feel like a weekend, but by then half of it had already gone. I’d feel guilty that I’d wasted the Saturday in a haze. And then the cycle would repeat the following week.

It wasn’t until I started paying attention to it that I realised something important:

It wasn’t physical exhaustion. It was mental left overs from an unfinished week.

We think we shut down when we close our laptop. But hybrid work changed that. When your office is your spare room or the corner of the kitchen, simply shutting the lid doesn’t signal anything to your brain.

Your laptop is off.
But your work brain is still running in the background.

And unless you close the week properly, your mind will happily keep working long after you stop.

Why this happens: what the research shows

This isn’t just personal experience. There is a surprising amount of research that explains why weekends often fail to restore us.

1. The Zeigarnik Effect

Unfinished tasks stay active in the brain. Your mind keeps looping them because it does not want you to forget. This creates intrusive thoughts and the sense of having your week “still running” in your head.

2. Cognitive offloading only works if your brain trusts the system

Writing tasks down only clears your mind if the brain believes those notes will be returned to. If not, your mind continues to hold onto them. A structured Friday ritual solves this because it signals closure.

3. Weekend recovery requires psychological detachment

Studies show that people who mentally detach on weekends return stronger on Monday. Those who don’t detach report higher stress and lower energy, even if they technically had more hours off.

4. Context switching makes the mental residue worse

The more you switch between tasks, tabs, rooms, emails, kids, Teams chats, and Slack threads, the more your mind scatters. Hybrid work increased switching dramatically. A weekly reset pulls everything back into one place.

5. Monday bottlenecks create false overwhelm

Research shows Monday mornings feel awful mainly because of reactivation. You are not overwhelmed by workload. You are overwhelmed by remembering what the workload even is.

6. High performers use shutdown rituals

Athletes cool down after an intense session. Knowledge workers don’t. Yet the brain needs closure just as much as the body does.

This is exactly why weekends feel heavy. It is not your workload. It is the loose ends.

And this is why I started treating Friday afternoon differently.

The insight that changed everything

If you want weekends to feel like weekends, and if you want to hit Monday with energy, you need a moment where you formally close the week.

Not emotionally.
Not vaguely.
Not “I’ll remember this on Monday”.

A real closure point.

A weekly shutdown ritual that empties your mind, ties off loose threads, captures what mattered, and sets you up for the next week.

Not complicated.
Not time consuming.
Not a forced march through your entire to do list.

Just thirty minutes where you pull the week together and put it down.

A weekly reset.

Below is the exact method I use every Friday. You can copy it or adapt it. There is also a full AI prompt that will run the Reset for you so you can start this ritual this week.

This is the tool that protects your weekends and supercharges your Mondays.

Here is exactly how to do it

The Weekly Reset Framework

You only need thirty minutes. Here is the structure plus 6 prompts you can use right now to get you started including my “Flagship Friday Wrap Up Prompt”.

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Coffee in hand. Comfortable. Audience mode. The Department for Transport away day was already buzzing and I was looking forward to being a human sponge. Then I glanced at the agenda.

There it was. The cross-industry commercial performance slot. My slot. Except I had delegated it. My colleague was set for a tidy Teams cal…

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I think it depends on why you are reading it. If you are reading for pure enjoyment, maybe it doesn’t matter. But if you are reading because you be…

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I’ve never really bought into that. My best results have come from having an actual conversation with the AI - going back and forth, refining as I go. That hasn’t changed.

But here’s what has changed: GPT-5.

It’s only been out a few days, but already it’s clear that the way you prompt now matters more than it did before. Not because it’s “pickier” - quite the opposite - but because it’s smarter, more connected, and more context aware.

For the first time, ChatGPT can remember discussions you had weeks ago - before you needed to set up a “project”. This means it now comes into each conversation with a rounded picture of you: what you’ve been working on, the tone you like, the kinds of examples you’ve used before.

That’s brilliant… until it’s not.

This week I was brainstorming newsletter ideas, and GPT-5 started pulling in threads from a conversation we’d had about moving house. Interesting? Yes. Relevant? Not remotely.

That’s the trade-off. With GPT-5’s expanded memory and longer attention span, you have to be sharper and clearer when you start a conversation - or it will happily blend the wrong ingredients into your recipe.

So here’s the framework I’ve been using to keep things on track - one that’s about to become much more important for anyone using AI seriously.

The STAR Framework — for AI, not just job interviews

You might know STAR from interview prep: Situation, Task, Action, Results.

It works brilliantly in prompting too - not necessarily as a single, giant block of text, but as a conversational guide to make sure you’ve fed the AI everything it needs early on.

Why bother? Because vague prompts get you vague answers. And now, with GPT-5’s new “long memory,” unclear starting points will just lead it down the wrong rabbit hole for longer.

Here’s how STAR works when you’re talking to AI:

Situation – give it the background so it knows where you’re starting from.

Task – define the specific thing you want to work on together.

Action – tell it how you want it to behave and think.

Results – spell out the exact type of output you want.

Done right, this changes the whole tone of your interaction. The AI stops being a generic content-spitter and starts feeling like a partner who “gets it” from the start.

If you’re a free subscriber, this is where we part ways for today. Paid readers get the full breakdown: how to actually structure each STAR element, examples you can copy-paste, and the tweaks that make GPT-5 push your thinking instead of parroting it.

The STAR Framework in Action - How to Prompt GPT-5 Like a Pro

This is where STAR really earns its keep. Let’s break it down step-by-step, with prompts you can literally copy, paste, and adapt for whatever you’re working on.

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“I think they might be about to attack me. Their eyes are staring straight at me. Are they about to burn down my village and steal my goat?”

Most likely not….this i…

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The itinerary was pristine - times, connections, schedules. We’d visualised how our Three Peaks by Rail challenge would unfold over three days. Jo, Mark, Aishah, and I were ready to conquer Snowdon, Scafell Pike, and Ben Nevis while traveling between them on a specially chartered train.

What we got instead was a masterclass in a…

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